Heather Donahue

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Wait a sec: A movie about a writer in Hollywood who gets to the top without having a real script!? Ya don't say!

Kevin Taylor (Jordan Bridges) is a Hollywood newcomer who can't get anywhere with his screenwriting, so he ends up working as a personal assistant to a small production company. Tired of being teased by his more successful compatriots, he invents a writer and a script called The New Suit, which of course becomes The Hot Thing in Hollywood, despite the fact that no one has met the writer or read the script. Things spiral toward a bidding war and into absurdity.

Boys and Girls plays like a college version of When Harry Met Sally..., with just as much fun and fewer contrivances. Here, the key couple is Ryan and Jennifer, who meet by chance on a plane as pre-teens, and continually bump into one another until their lives bisect at Cal-Berkeley. Ryan, played by Flavor of the Moment Freddie Prinze Jr., is a bright, sometimes awkward engineering student who loves planning and order; Jennifer, Meet Joe Black's Claire Forlani, majors in Latin for no particular reason and aims to travel. Both wish they could apply their positive personality traits to their floundering relationships, but it just doesn't work.

The smart script for Boys and Girls, written by the humbly-credited "Drews", succeeds in part because Ryan and Jennifer nurture their unique friendship for nearly all of the film. While the inevitable Hollywood ending may be in viewers' minds from the get-go, The Drews and director Robert Iscove keep us guessing if this pair might ever connect with each other, and the sweet performances by Prinze and Forlani keep us interested.. The couple's interplay, and the machinations of their separate, frustrating lovelives, are satisfying enough that a sunshiny ending is not required.

The Blair Witch Project has the bizarre distinction of being the first horror film ever to give me nightmares before having seen it. The nightmares will probably continue for awhile, even though Blair Witch is not, contrary to the reports I've heard, the scariest movie ever made.

Not even close. The conceit of The Blair Witch Project is this: Three eager filmmakers go into the woods of Maryland in search of material for a project about "The Blair Witch," a supposed woman who was exiled from the town of Blair during the witch trial era.

Another rotten romance inexplicably released by formerly respectable indie studio Miramax, "Boys and Girls" is a badly miscast and sadly stagnant collegiate rip-off of "When Harry Met Sally," devoid of a single moment of emotional sincerity or even a single character interesting enough to care about.

Even less original than its pathetically uncreative title suggests, it's the story of a boy (Freddie Prinze, Jr.) and a girl (Claire Forlani) who meet from time to time throughout their young lives and pick on each other before winding up at the same college, become best friends and then complicate their relationship by falling into bed.

When it's not stealing scenes wholesale from "When Harry..." (they bond over bad break-ups; she makes a scene in a restaurant; he comforts her while she cries, which leads to kissing, sex, awkwardness, and feigned declarations that "it was a mistake"), the movie is a lazy undergrad romance about generic good-looking students who never study and live in $1,200-a-month apartments decorated like photo shoot in Wallpaper magazine.